Anti-assisted suicide forum held at Assumption College

WORCESTER  Leaders and supporters of the successful movement that killed ballot Question 2 in November  dubbed "Prescribing Medicine to End Life"  gathered at Assumption College Saturday.

Their mission: Keep alive public consciousness on why they believe state-sanctioned suicide remains a bad idea.

Like the multifaceted and protracted abortion rights debate, the battle over whether to create a legal right allowing terminally ill individuals to kill themselves spans economic, political, social, religious and family institutions.

The three speakers at the forum, held inside the Hagan Campus Center and titled "Death with Real Dignity," said continued vigilance to thwart attempts to legalize doctor-assisted suicide is essential.

They pointed at a new bill filed in the state House of Representatives.

The legislation, known as House-1998, aims to give doctors legal authority to assist the terminally ill to die at their time of choosing.

"What are we going to do about this challenge that keeps coming up?" asked panelist Dr. Paul A. Carpentier. "Do not kill the patient, kill the pain" they suffer under, he said.

Lawyer Henry C. Luthin spoke Saturday, joining Dr. Carpentier by saying legalizing physician-assisted suicide amounts to an attack on the elderly. The men said older folks need to feel secure  and to know that those around them are not looking for an easy way to save money on health care costs.

Among the nearly 100 attendees were three sisters who grew up in Worcester and share adamant opposition to the legislative proposal to legalize physician-assisted suicide.

Their mother, Ann T. Whalen, passed away at age 80 last year. She raised nine children.

"We took care of her for eight years. She had Alzheimer's," her 56-year-old daughter Margaret Brophy said.

"She took care of us; we did the same for her. It is important to value older people," said Mrs. Brophy, who now lives in Barre with her husband, Mark, and their children.

"A lot of people have lost their way and do not value older people," she said in an interview at Saturday's conference.

"With the defeat of Question 2 last year ... we can make a difference nationwide," said panelist Allison LeDoux.

The November ballot question allowing a physician to prescribe medicine to patients with less than six months to live was narrowly defeated, by 51 percent to 49 percent, on Nov. 6.

Following the defeat of Question 2, a spokesman for the leading organization seeking its passage, Stephen Crawford of Dignity 2012, said at the time that the vote "was only the beginning of the conversation about physician-assisted suicides in Massachusetts."

Referring to the legislation filed in January, Ms. LeDoux said, "We want to be vigilant and keep an eye on where it's going," adding that "the people in the pew" became energized and mobilized to defeat the measure.

Questions about the morality and legal rights of the terminally ill to take their lives has simmered in the United States for the past generation.

Medical community involvement with suicide became a social issue in the late 1980s with the actions of Dr. Jack Kevorkian. He assisted the terminally ill, helping them die  prior to his eight-year incarceration on second-degree murder charges.

Included in Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel "The Idiot," published in 1869, a terminally ill person pondering suicide expresses his tribulations.

The 17-year-old Hippolite Terentyev, dying from tuberculosis, voices a rambling defense of a right to take his life, sprinkled with feelings of shame, lamentation, uncertainty and pathos.

"Can't they understand that the more I forget myself, the more I give myself up to this final illusion of life and love?" Hippolite asks.

"There is a limit to the shame in the avowal of one's own insignificance and powerlessness beyond which a man cannot go," he says.

"If I could have never been born, I certainly never would have chosen existence on such ridiculous terms ... there is a temptation: nature has so limited my activity by its three-week sentence that suicide is perhaps the only thing I still have time to begin and bring to a conclusion of my own free will."

Lawyer Henry C. Luthin criticized House 1998 for including language that presumes there is an existing legal "right to request" suicide.

He said language in the bill's preamble says the "Commonwealth of Massachusetts affirms the existing right of capable, terminally ill patients to request compassionate aid in dying and obtain medication from a physician" to accomplish that.

Mr. Luthin said the legislation "like the ballot question requires the falsification of the death certificate" by stating the terminal medical condition of the dying patient  instead of attributing death to doctor-prescribed medicine that would actually cause the death.

The lawyer also took umbrage at proponents of assisted suicide who want to bar the use of "suicide" in official state documents  should the law take effect.

Mr. Luthin said a section of the bill says: "State regulations, documents and reports shall not refer to the practice of aid in dying under this chapter as 'suicide' or 'assisted suicide.' "